Newham Council Ignores Mandatory Requirements On Spending Data

At the beginning of December, I wrote about a promise made by Newham council - that in response to the new local authority requirement to publish every item of its spending over £500 by the end of January, it would "comply with the regulations regarding publication of payments set out by Government".

The guidance issued by the Department of Communities and Local Government in September last year says that councils should publish spending on a monthly basis, in CSV format, with the detail of "all individual invoices, grant payments, payments to other public bodies, expense payments or other such transactions", broken down into meaningful expense areas and including supplier names.

The deadline of 31 January is now looming and Newham council has finally managed to place some information online. And guess what? They've completely ignored the mandatory requirement that information is published in CSV file format and instead issued a 115-page PDF file, making it incredibly difficult to analyse. Neither has the council provided a 'licence to reuse', meaning that technically others will need prior written permission to reproduce the data.

It is possible to plough through and find the details, for example, of the council's expensive consultants (look out for the expenditure type 'external advice' and the name 'Kingsgate Interim'), but the local authority has made it as difficult and inaccessible as possible.

Why am I not surprised?

UPDATE

I asked 'Information Governance' at Newham council to explain why their previous commitment had been broken and they promised to get back to me - by 25 February!!!